Thursday, February 15, 2018

About Writing:

I write fiction. Long ago I learned the value of having away time. Often I walk to cool the brain, so to speak. Taking time away from the creative process is critical. While strolling along a sidewalk, or along the beach, while the mind is shifted into neutral, allows the subconscious to send up messages about the writing. The good writer, I believe, is one who honors those messages, and takes the time to record them on a cell phone app, or to jot them down.

Some writers garden. Others play sports. For me, I find tinkering with cars, old cars, takes me to a peaceful place. I grew up around a Portuguese family of mechanics who were always bent over running engines, and I became their tool runner. So, being around engines, pulling them apart, washing them, giving them more power by deciding what pistons to put in them, gives me a comforting feeling. It allows me to touch my childhood. And, as a writer, it allows the ideas to come, ideas that refocus the fiction and keep it on track. The two automotive books you see on this blog are testaments to my automotive hobby. My New Book:

I wanted to announce to the world: I published a new book, another new book.

This book is for automotive enthusiasts. For years it has been a popular upgrade among car guys and gals, to take an electric radiator fan from a salvage yard, and install it on a vehicle that came with a conventional, belt driven fan.

"Ha!" You may laugh. "The only thing you get from a junkyard is junk." However, my dear know-it-all, that is not quite true. Those true blue companies who supply automotive stores that you are so eager to give your money to because you believe you are getting quality, are not what they used to be. Most of them are using Chinese made products and sticking them in their own boxes. So, my friend, you may be one buying junk!

On the other hand, the e-fans found on vehicles in the salvage yards had to stand up to very strict standards. If one fails, an owner could lose an engine that is covered by a warranty, and the manufacturers didn't want that to happen. So, they made great fans.

In my book I take the four best that everyone on the automotive forums is talking about. I give you all the info you need, and tell you how to build a fully automatic fan system for any vehicle. The ones I mention are very powerful fans. As one forum member mentioned: 'This thing'll pull a cat through the grill.'

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

The families of two squad members are butchered. The Army called the problem a data breach. Lieut. Jason Dalton called it a major fuck-up. And how is the Army going to deal with it, how are they going to protect him? That was easy. The Army buried him.

Eighteen gun salute, families gathered around crying, and nice words were spoken over an empty casket. This was called Army witness protection.

Dalton was whisked away, given a new identity, and thrown back into civilian life where he could deal with being hunted. It didn't matter that the cartels would do anything to find his whereabouts. That was the price he paid for doing black ops work south of the border.

Dalton could've chose any city in the US to be dropped in, but he chose LA, because that's where Jax lived. Even she believed he was dead, or did she? Either way, he knew the way the cartels operated. If they could get their hands on her, they'd be able to find out whether he really was dead. That's why he chose to live in LA. Here he could look after Jax.

So with the Army's help Dalton pulled some strings and managed to get his private investigator license operable. Having a gun in his hand, or dangling under his arm, reassured him out on the streets.

He was living in one of those run down office buildings in downtown Long Beach when it happened. You know the type of building: musky smelling lobby with an old tile floor, and wide sloping staircases everywhere you looked. And of course, like some cliché out of the Bogert film, there was a creaky old elevator with brass fixtures that didn't work. And then, into his office walked a bombshell named Sophie Devonshire.

Mrs. Devonshire had discovered a photograph of a priceless artifact among her late husband's belongings. Up until that point Dalton had been laying low. He didn't want to do anything that would expose him or lift his head above the masses and make him visible to any operative for the cartels. But now that was impossible because with Sophie Devonshire came a storm. That storm and military written all over it. Into his office burst this hit squad with automatic weapons.

But the stocky little killer who came in after them was the one that scared Dalton. By the time the gun smoke cleared, and don't got released from the police station, after the bodies had been taken away, he thought about the artifact at Sophie Devonshire had found the photograph of. Was she for real? Was the artifact real?

Or were they carefully chosen to lure Jason Dalton out of hiding? And if it was the latter, that meant that not only was the cartel close to him, but they were getting close to Jax, and he couldn't let that happen.

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

The Gamble: I'm going to spend over $1,500 that I barely have on editing, cover, and ads. I may loan money for more ads. I'm all in. I'm rolling the dice.

I have two suspense novels on Amazon, and they've been belly-up for a long time.

I refuse to let them die.

The plan: I am going to re-release each book. But each will get a rewrite, a new setting, new cover and title. And then comes tricky part.

The first book I'll be repackaging.

There are eight extremely important aspects to publishing a Kindle book that determine whether it lives or dies. If you want to be read, if you want sales and success, then study each aspect and make it perfect.

Practice them. Take a couple of hours for EACH! Get it to pop, to snap, and set that hook in the reader. Hook, hook, hook in the description.

This is an experiment for me. After months of classes and webinars and books on the subject, I am going to find out if it works. Can I take the book above, now belly-up, rotting in the sea of Amazon, and thump on its chest until a pulse awakens, until sales begin again? Can I turn it into a money-making endeavor? You can watch and learn. Join the group. Drop me a note.

Friday, July 28, 2017

I work hard to produce marketable books. Some produce a trickle of sales. Others float belly up in the fish bowl that is my Amazon Kindle account.

One little book has always been the train that could. I wrote it in two weeks! It is an automotive how-to. Tinkering on old cars relaxes me after writing. So, I turned that hobby to my advantage. I put it to work.

To my great surprise it just kept selling; not a lot, but a steady trickle. My book about 'hillbilly fuel injection' just kept trucking along. I chuckled every time I saw the sales report.

But then sales stopped! What happened? They never stopped before.

Authors, I can't stress this enough: You have to monitor your work. Every once in a while google your title. I did, and to my horror it was listed all over YouTube for free in pdf form.

But I owned the copyright. How could that be? This has been a problem since print was invented. I recently read about Dickens struggle with this issue!

What could I do? I scrolled to the bottom of the YouTube page and found a link for copyright information. There I filled out a form and reported all the pages that were selling my work. It was easy.

Within a couple of days they notified that the sites had been removed. They were easy to work with.

And, days after that the sales of my my little book began again. You have to monitor your work.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Want Free Books?
I wanted to share this image from my site because it sums up so many emotions involved in travel. And travel, the adventure, the romance, is the theme of my new book.

In the late nineteen-eighties I sold everything and moved into an abandoned house on the Caribbean. I spear fished for meat. I will let the book and the writing speak for itself. Here is the introduction:

From 1979 to 1987 I was a vagabond in Europe. I hitchhiked from Scandinavia to Spain several times and camped along the way. During that time I bailed hay, harvested apples, worked construction and taught English. My dream of becoming a writer pushed me to sell travel articles. At night I worked on a novel. I also married a European woman. However, in 1987, after a divorce, I returned to California.

The culture shock, compounded by the pain of divorce, was overwhelming. I sought professional help. The therapist I found changed my life by introducing me to meditation. While working with the therapist, I was startled when a radical idea popped into my head: I needed a time-out from the demands of daily life in the US. I needed to escape schedules, work, stress, trafﬁc, sirens and noise.

Could I ﬁnd a simple village where I could rebuild my life? Could I manage that for three months? As my escape plan formulated, and it seemed I might actually move to a foreign country, I found the most difﬁcult part of the preparation was giving myself permission. I constantly had to
confront a nagging voice that was saying: What will the neighbors think? I counteracted that voice with: ‘This is a needed process. I am allowing myself to do this.'

My cover story to friends and relatives was: I'm going abroad to work on a novel. That didn't meet with quite so much mockery as, ‘I'm leaving the US to meditate for a few months.' But where would I go? I focused on Mexico because it was close and inexpensive. I began reading all I could ﬁnd about that country.

If you begin inner work and ask for guidance, you have to stay open to direction from the universe. It may come in a way you never suspected. For example, if your normal route to work is shut down, don't think: Nothing goes my way. No, relax and stay open. Maybe your detour will take you past a billboard that sparks a new idea, or supplies the direction you need.

My own guidance came about in a similar fashion. I got the idea that it would be great to go for a walk along the beach. I don't usually walk on the beach, but I followed the prompt. While walking, I was intrigued by a dive shop window that displayed snorkeling equipment. Inside the shop I met a Mexican man. We chatted for over an hour. When I mentioned a coming trip to Mexico he told me about a village on the Caribbean where he lived. His description made me curious and I made plans to visit. The rest is history.

***

The village was two sandy streets between the Caribbean and the swamp. Morning and evening, when the sun was kind, Mayan women in ﬂower-embroidered dresses, walked to the tin roof market. Children dropped bicycles at the broken curb, shooed away the town dogs, and disappeared inside. Moments later they returned, clutching plastic bags ﬁlled with cola, and shouted to friends playing basketball on the square.

In that forgotten village I felt the weight of big city life drop from my shoulders. I knew it was home. Within days I found an abandoned house, shoveled out the sand, strung up a hammock, built a table of driftwood, barnacles here and there.

There I began a routine of meditation, afﬁrmations, and writing. It was my way transitioning from married life to living as a single man, preparing myself for a new future, imagining what my life would be without my mate. When I wasn't doing my inner work or writing, I was spearﬁshing in the warm Caribbean. Fish of every color swarmed around the coral as I ﬂoated past. Words did not exist in that under water jungle. My mind was free to process the inner work. Day by day the waves, the sea water, dissolved the memories. The arguments washed away.

My time beside the Caribbean came about because I had been open to the idea of going for a walk. Because I acted on that idea the universe delivered what I needed. I took the time to listen and the answers came. I hope your way is equally fulﬁlling. I hope you enjoy these stories.

I will soon be releasing Bigger Bowl soon. If you would like a free copy for joining my review group, or Free copies of my other books, visit Want Free Books?

Thursday, May 4, 2017

I recently had that conversation with a man. I think he needed to
convince himself of that. I think Kindle has convinced us all of that.

I thought about my own journey to be a writer.

From the time I was seven or eight I used to wake up and write down stories. In class I wrote frantically with a pencil to finish writing assignments. I wrote several novels that have mercifully been burned.

Joy reading for children

How many lovers have gotten jealous due to time I spent with my writing? At some point in my life, after untold women had left me, I realized that no matter how sweet the loving was, no matter how deeply I stared into their eyes, not the hottest of sex could replace the joy I experienced when creating worlds, creating a novel. Maybe that was why they left. They sensed they were second on my list.

Oh, I should mention the untold number of conferences I've attended, the offered seductions from NY

Writing in Yucatan

agents in exchange for a reading, the thousands of short story and novel and article rejections. Should I mention how a newspaper in Florida sat on one of my articles for six months so they could send their own writer to the location of my article? No, I probably shouldn't mention that. I did, however, send that travel editor a letter, saying they had won my a-hole editor of the year award!

Wrote for newspapers

There have been years of struggle, untold classes concerning point of view, structure, voice, query letters, marketing, and on and on. There have been decades of rewrites and crap first drafts, promises from huge literary agencies, personal calls from London, editors raving about how wonderful the manuscript was, only to be followed by harsh rejections.

Zero sales, but two books stolen!

I've written in closets, garages, abandoned houses in Yucatan (photo), on the back of trucks in Africa, living rooms, libraries, and Starbucks. I wrote through the rejections. I continued to write as the women in my life shouted and screamed about my work not producing money, and how I was crazy to continue doing it. But, they didn't know how sweet the mental copulation is with my mistress!

Now I write with Dude, a rescue surf cat

Yes, hell, anyone can write a book. It is a formula taught
everywhere. But, I ask, do you have something to say? Is there art, joy, revelation, insight in your
words? Or, do you throw out a dead body in the beginning and follow the formula? Are you an illustrator of scenes, or a painter of them, an artist? Are your books quickly tossed aside, or placed on a shelf and touched lovingly each time the owner passes?

Friday, April 21, 2017

To all my readers: I'm moving to www.authorkevinrhill.com. The site should be up and running in a couple of days.

I have enjoyed blogger, but the limitations of this framework have made it necessary to relocate. I hope you will come and visit once the site is up and running.

Free suspense novel and a free short story.

As a grand opening gift, I will be giving away a couple of titles.

I hope you will come and enjoy my soon to be released book, Escape from Mexico as well. Do you dream of selling everything and moving to a simple Caribbean village? If so, I did it for real, and I have included a memoir about it.

Or, would you like to be footloose in Europe, roaming from country to country, soaking up the history and the culture, the food, the fascinating people? Well, you guessed it: I did that for ten years! And in the book I have a memoir about life in Europe, as well as several short works of fiction set in Europe. You get a glimpse of the author with the memoirs, followed by works of fiction from the same locale.

Don't miss it! If you'd like to get a free copy to review on Amazon, leave me a note on my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/people/Kevin-R-Hill/100011790198532

Free Book!

About the Author

Kevin began his writing career by selling travel articles, and now continues along that path with suspense novels.
He resides in California. When not writing he’s tinkering on his 40-year-old truck, working a demo project around the house, or hanging with his fat rescue cat, Dude, and planning his next travel adventure.